Kaltenburg (33 page)

A committee was restructured—Matzke took over the chair, although Kaltenburg had done much preliminary spadework behind the scenes. There was a post to be filled—by Matzke's candidate. A congress in the Soviet Union—the deputation consisted entirely of Matzke's people. Kaltenburg shook his head; the man was rather overreaching himself, after having failed for so many years in Leipzig to make any real impact—but we, hearing the disappointing news during the morning meeting, looked at the professor and could see he was thinking of Leningrad.

Somebody once claimed to have heard that Ludwig Kaltenburg stomped up and down behind his closed study door shouting repeatedly, “The Party, the Party.” To this day I regard this as an invention, some assistant wanting to impress his colleagues, and in any case everybody knew that Eberhard Matzke was not a member of the Party. No, on the contrary, Kaltenburg took every opportunity to warn against jumping to conclusions, took on the role of self-assured intermediary. When the first German students of zoology graduated in the Soviet Union, everyone was afraid that their return would mean our subject would soon be dominated by Party loyalists—but Kaltenburg praised these intrepid young people, stressing the quality of Russian zoology, and “After all, gentlemen, we're all ornithologists together.”

He was convinced that even Professor Matzke would calm down eventually. Reinhold in Berlin, getting to know his new colleague at close quarters, thought otherwise, but Reinhold, the grand old man, had often been fearful of his successors, especially when they were keen to strike out in new directions. Reinhold's visits to Dresden became more frequent, he still had relations in his home city, but it looked as though he was visiting his family mainly so that he could also call in at Loschwitz. The phone rang. “Ah, my dear Professor”—Kaltenburg looked across at me—“it goes without saying that you're welcome at any time”; Kaltenburg was making sure he showed the proper respect that, according to Reinhold, was lacking in Matzke; “I'll send my driver,” Kaltenburg was nodding in the semidarkness next to the hall stand, yes, Krause still knew the address.

He tried to cheer Reinhold up, to take his mind off things. One day, as the limousine drew up outside the villa, he told Krause to keep the engine running, greeted Reinhold through the open passenger window, pushed me onto the rear seat, and followed me in: “We're going to Strehlen.”

The professor made Krause stop at Tiergartenstrasse, he invited us to take a little stroll through the Great Garden, for one thing ideas came most easily when you were walking, he said, and for another I knew that he didn't want anyone overhearing his discussion with Reinhold. They must find an additional sphere of activity for “the young man”—Matzke was all of seven years younger than Kaltenburg. No, not a posting abroad, far away where you couldn't keep an eye on him, but a newly created framework that would satisfy his desire to be the first to break new ground for once in his life. Naturally, it must be a framework within which Eberhard Matzke was kept under careful control. A great undertaking, with a great new title to match for the Herr Professor Doktor—and all, be it noted, under the constant supervision of a worldly-wise international expert, a legendary figure among ornithologists: Reinhold himself.

We walked around Lake Carola, in less than twenty minutes a plan had been hatched, and we went back to the road. The chauffeur got out of the car, held the door open, but Kaltenburg signaled to him that we were going to walk on a bit further, pointing in the direction of the embankment.

“No need to worry. I'll explore the mood among the colleagues, take soundings in the Academy of Sciences and find out what can be done there. You'll see, everybody will support you.”

And now it comes back to me clearly, it was the year of Hungary, we had reached the Wasaplatz, I can see the black limousine, Krause driving along beside us at a walking pace as we turned into August Bebel Strasse. Reinhold waving his stick, Kaltenburg gesticulating wildly, as soon as we had set off downhill from the Institute the two had started a debate on the history of ornithology. By now they were on to Georg Marcgraf and Carl Illiger, dropping names like Bernstein, Kuhl, and Boie, not one of them survived into old age, consumption, tropical fever, my eyes were fixed on the barrack gates at the other end of the street. Every step we took was being watched from there, we were moving around the edge of the military security zone, I wouldn't like to know what went on behind those walls at that time, nor what measures might have been taken if Ludwig Kaltenburg had not stopped suddenly and pointed to one of the fairly unremarkable villas: “This is where he grew up.”

We were standing in front of the house where Reinhold spent his childhood and youth. I think he was genuinely quite moved, Reinhold in his loose linen suit under a light coat, up there in that attic room was where he had spent his afternoons with grass snakes and lizards he had caught, here in a large enclosure alongside the stable was where the cross-bred offspring of goldfinches and redpolls had first seen the light of day. And as a boy he too used to observe the crows on the Wasaplatz. Ludwig Kaltenburg's surprise for him had succeeded completely. But for my part I was taken right back to the days of our excursions, how long ago was that, all that “induction by personal inspection,” only a few years, I was still a boy, collecting signatures for world peace, didn't even know that one day I would be working with Kaltenburg at the Institute, wasn't even sure I wanted to stay in Dresden, didn't even know Klara Hagemann yet, while she was living only a few hundred meters from this spot.

I
N JUNE
1956 a truck drove through Dresden carrying prisoners liberated from the camps. People crowded the pavements, law enforcement officers kept the road clear. In order to give as many townspeople as possible the chance to study these figures, the open truck transported its cargo at walking pace through the city along the following route: from Dr. Kurt Fischer Platz down the Königsbrücker Strasse to the Platz der Einheit. From Bautzner Strasse into Hoyerswerdaer Strasse. Across the Einheitsbrücke to Güntzplatz. From Güntzstrasse, a right turn into Grunaer Strasse. The truck followed Thälmannstrasse as far as the Postplatz, the procession ending at the Theaterplatz.

“I'm sure you noticed it too?” Klara inquired.

“Yes, dreadful.” Professor Kaltenburg looked away into the distance.

It had rained a lot throughout the summer, overcast days, muddy holes all over the city. In the gray light the skin of the prisoners looked duller than ever, though they were very young, just a few of them seemed older. Beneath this dirty sky, however, that may have been a false impression, the hollow eyes, the pinched cheeks, their poor teeth. No, they must simply have been exhausted.

Kaltenburg listened again to Klara's description of the prisoners' truck. The inmates' shirts and trousers, the way they hung loosely from their meager frames. Gray and white stripes. No, no trouser creases. Yes, rough linen. The moment when the driver braked because he got too close to the group in front: the way the prisoners lurched, holding on to each other, for a second you thought they were all going to lose their balance.

“What an awful sight,” said Kaltenburg.

Because you weren't sure whether what you were seeing in their eyes was the shock of performers or the fear of camp inmates.

A father pointed with his furled umbrella to a spot far ahead at the crossroads, explaining something to the daughter who was sitting on his shoulders. A family festival. The onlookers waved and called out. A column of trekking refugees came along, with handcarts and baby carriages. At the beginning you could wave to the Saxon nobility, Augustus the Strong under a canopy. The shy young ladies-in-waiting grouped around a model of the Church of Our Lady waving back with their handkerchiefs, the magnificent clothes, the wigs, the powder and lipstick. Hour after hour the postwar rubble-clearing women, flag wavers, apprentice gardeners, fanfares, airplane builders, filed past. By this time you had nearly forgotten the steam locomotive, the horse-drawn tram, and the historic milk cart, along with the float bearing the inscription
ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS
, its crew sitting on their bench looking out searchingly from under their steel helmets. Still to come were a combine harvester, the Wartburg vehicle fleet, a car from the animated film studios surmounted by Pittiplatsch, the cartoon figure. One of the last displays of this parade to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Dresden was a huge model of the new brand of cigarette, Jubilar, carried right across the city on the bare legs of six girls.

“Of course it was easy to miss them in such a motley crew,” suggested the professor.

Yes, red flags. No, no sewn-on Stars of David. All the same, it was clear that the Jubilee Committee had not been able to make up their minds how to deal with the ex-prisoners. Perhaps the idea had been to have them celebrate their happy release by cheering and raising a fist. But the thin young men didn't smile, their expression was subdued, as though exposure to all these stares was robbing them of their last ounce of strength. And hardly any of the onlookers dared to wave to these figures in their strikingly drab outfits, moving past in silence. You might almost have thought you were looking at real prisoners.

“Hermann was looking for you,” Klara remarked. “Maybe you were sitting in the VIP stand in Grunaer Strasse?”

Kaltenburg looked at me, then back at Klara. He hung his head. “I admit it, I wasn't there. I dodged the jubilee parade.”

A free day—the prospect was just too tempting, especially as it looked as though the weather might be half decent. In the dawn light the professor quietly hauled his motorbike out of the garage, pushed the machine out onto the road and as far as the next corner. Jumped on, started the engine, and took off before the first of his neighbors could peer out between their curtains. He rode on to Bautzen, he said, the fresh morning air, insects on his goggles, then he turned off south of Weissenberg and, more slowly now, cruised through the villages, the hamlets. Maltitz, Mostitz, all those names, Lautitz, Mauschwitz, Meuselwitz, Krobnitz, and Dittmannsdorf, he'd hardly encountered a single soul.

Goldfinches among the linseed. For a while he had ridden along a path that led straight across the fields, following at a walking pace behind a flock of sparrows in the morning light that was examining a stretch of wheat, acre by acre. So by stages he topped one hill after another, always keeping the birds in view beside him, and at some point, although—being on a motorbike—the professor had no need to pedal, on reaching a loamy valley bottom he found himself out of breath. The tree sparrows took a bath. They disappeared. The lark was singing. Ludwig Kaltenburg was thirsty.

In the midday quiet, he arrived at Reichenbach. Deutsch Paulsdorf, Kemnitz, Russenhäuser. In Bernstadt auf dem Eigen he finally came across a pub, with the strange name The Earth's Axis. He sat there for a long time over his beer, talking to the locals, giving advice, picking up information. An old farmer's wife showed him her geese. He wasn't known here. Kaltenburg in strange parts. He toyed with the idea of spending the night in Bernstadt. It wasn't until late in the evening that he set off for home, without a headlight, the bulb was kaput. He suspected Krause, but he didn't want the day spoiled right at the end by a minor character. He arrived in Loschwitz exactly in time for the morning feed.

T
HE WHOLE TIME
, a scraggly rook with a bright greenish-shimmering breast had been patiently worrying away at an uprooted tree trunk. I recognized some fibrous tissue in its beak as it flew off to save its booty from a roving terrier. The rook was skimming away above the water even before the dog had noticed it, its breast feathers shone ever more brightly in the last of the sunlight over the Elbe, shone almost with a petrol-slick sheen.

Like me, the interpreter was watching the departing rook, and now the bird had disappeared on the Pillnitz side.

“Are there any photos of the truck?”

I've never seen any. And if it hadn't stopped right in front of us, we might not have taken much notice of it. Klara and I, Ulli, Martin, Herr and Frau Hagemann, we were all awkwardly placed among the crowd, the parade came to a halt, perhaps somewhere further on a group had got out of sync, the driver hadn't been paying attention, had to brake abruptly, the prisoner figures got a shock, they lurched, tried to steady themselves—and it was this sudden movement that gave us a shock in turn. We didn't say anything, but as Herr Hagemann looked into his younger daughter's eyes and nodded slowly, very slowly, as though only his damp raincoat collar was bothering him, he let it be understood that Klara's parents too were queasy at the sight of such an image.

I don't remember how the rest of that Sunday went. I mean, we probably sat together that evening at the Hagemanns' discussing the Moscow revelations, reading out bits from the West German papers, just as we talked incessantly at that time about Stalin's sudden fall from grace. It was some months later, maybe at about the time of the Soviet march on Budapest, when the Dresden festivities had long since passed into history, that Klara's thoughts returned to the procession. It was only once Stalin's burning gaze was finally extinguished that she got around to asking Professor Kaltenburg about the truck with the prisoners that summer.

On closer consideration, she said, these young people dressed up as camp inmates represented a slap in the face, a slap in the face for all those driven out of the country barely three and a half years earlier.

“And we still don't know the whereabouts of many people who disappeared at that time. Are they still stuck in their prison cells? Being interrogated? Are they still being made to pay the price for the great show trial?”

“Fear,” murmured Kaltenburg.

“Fear?”